Non-graphic · Sensitive events discussed without explicit detail.

May 20, 2012: The murder that became a 13-year journey to execution

Matthew Lee Johnson (TDCJ public record) · Nancy Judith Harris (NBC 5 DFW / People.com)

On the morning of May 20, 2012, Nancy Judith Harris arrived at the Fina Whip-In convenience store in Garland, Texas, for her opening shift. She was 76 years old, a retired postal worker who had returned to part-time work at the store she had staffed for years, known to regular customers for her warm manner. That morning, her granddaughters were already making plans for their next "Nini Days" — the Friday tradition they kept, the dollar store trips and McDonald's runs they shared with the grandmother they called Nini.

Matthew Lee Johnson entered the store shortly after Harris began her shift. Surveillance footage captured what happened next: Johnson, then 36, moved behind the counter and poured a bottle of lighter fluid over Harris's head while demanding money. After she opened the cash register, he took bills, coins, her ring, two cigarette lighters, and some cigarettes. Then he ignited the lighter fluid.

Harris was engulfed in flames. She ran for the sink in the back, tried to remove her burning shirt, leaned over the basin — her shirt reignited. She ran outside, screaming. A nearby witness used a fire extinguisher to put out the flames. Police and paramedics found her with severe burns across her body. She was taken by helicopter to Parkland Memorial Hospital's burn unit in Dallas.

Before she died five days later, on May 25, 2012, Harris gave police a description of her attacker: a heavy-set Black man with short dark hair and a chubby face. Within an hour of the attack, officers had Johnson in custody after a brief foot chase. He was found with the stolen cash and Harris's ring.

Johnson had been born in Dallas County in 1975 and raised in a difficult household, mainly by brothers and cousins. His adult criminal record was extensive: car theft at 15, an arrest in 1994 for violently resisting police officers and biting one of them, a 2004 robbery conviction that sent him to prison for five years, and release in 2009. By 2011, he was arrested again, this time for theft from a former employer. At the time of Harris's murder, he was out on bond for that charge.

He stood trial in Dallas County in October 2013. The surveillance footage formed the backbone of the prosecution's case. The defense argued that Johnson was under the influence of drugs and had not intended to kill Harris — only to scare her. They called his family members, his wife, and his former coworkers to testify about his drug addiction and childhood abuse, urging the jury to recommend a life sentence rather than death. The jury rejected the argument. Johnson was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death.

For the next twelve years, Johnson pursued every available appeal. His attorneys raised issues including the adequacy of his defense representation and the role his brain injuries and drug addiction played in the crime. They applied for clemency from the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles. None of it succeeded. His execution date was set.

On the morning of May 20, 2025, Nancy Harris's murder reached its 13th anniversary. That evening, at the state penitentiary in Huntsville, Texas, Matthew Lee Johnson was executed by lethal injection. He was 49 years old. His last words, addressed to Harris's family, who were present in the execution chamber, were an apology: "As I look at each one of you, I can see her on that day. I just please ask for y'all's forgiveness. I never meant to hurt her."

It was the fourth execution in Texas in 2025, and one of two executions carried out in the United States on May 20, 2025. The other was Benjamin Ritchie, put to death in Indiana for killing Beech Grove Police Officer William Toney in 2000 — a second death penalty milestone on the same calendar date.

Nancy Harris's family attended Johnson's execution. In the years between her death and his, they had spoken to reporters about the loss of a woman they described as devoted to her three granddaughters, a reader who kept up with her favorite shows, a neighbor who knew everyone on her street. Her daughter told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that the execution did not bring closure — it simply ended a chapter in a story that would never return to normal. Harris was buried at Restland Memorial Park in Dallas, beside her husband, who had died before her.

Johnson's execution closed the state's file on one of the more unusual convergence points in modern death penalty history: a crime and its punishment separated by exactly 13 years, falling on the same calendar date. Whether that symmetry brought any measure of meaning to Harris's family, or served any broader purpose in how the criminal justice system processes such cases, remains a question that outlasts both the victim and the man who killed her.

*Today in True Crime by Case Bound — 2026-05-20*